Browsers can be installed by a user. Nothing stopping your kid from downloading his own copy and configuring it as he sees fit. Put that function in the kernel and it's more difficult (but not impossible) to circumvent.
Clive Sinclair's company collapsed within five years of shipping their first computer. Perhaps not a good counter-example.
That by itself is no mean feat of engineering.
If the cartridge detects that the user has more than three teeth, it refuses to work.
In what country is it legal to sell such balcony solar systems?
It is popular throughout the world with many millions of installs. Half the country (USA) has legislation allowing balcony either already on the books or in process.
And what country has such odd meters that flow into the wrong direction makes it count the same as the right direction?
With a unidirectional meter you can have counting of reverse flow be blocked or count as an absolute value of flow against you. I don't know the details about models and reasons for it yet I know people with these meters have been charged for unintentional export because they for example had the CT installed backwards.
You people have gone insane.
Stop trying to control every atom of existence and every move people make.
You're sick in the head, not visionaries, not thought leaders.
Go plant a garden and get back in touch with the real world.
No, NOT FARMVILLE!
There is a nicotine source that isn't at all age locked. I guess the teens will move on to these "cigarettes" you hear about from time to time.
They even come in cool Menthol.
The laws are a joke by people who apparently flunked "Hello World".
They demand a mechanism, but don't even offer guidance on what mechanism it should be. You can technically comply while having no 2 Linux installs following the same API, making it effectively useless.
A better approach would be a purely optional userspace package (perhaps call it "Californication") that returns 1 dword with the age information encoded in it. Each person installing it gets to decide what that encoding will be.
Yes, it returned 0x0BADF00D, that's the code for 18+.
Someone else might decide 0x0B00B1E5 means 18+.
Some early adopters of "Here's a complaint one, pretty please use it" included small operations like PGP. Others were small companies then, later to become large.
Not too long after, there was the whole flap around DeCSS for DVDs. The medium itself is nearly dead now, but it was individual efforts that rendered region coding largely a joke. The Chinese vendors whose DVD players didn't give a damn about region codes came second.
> genuine question - why was this code pushed now
Zuckerberg has aggressively been bribing politicians to enact this at the State level.
Several news stories about it though you have to search for terms like 'lobbying' and 'Meta' as fig leaves.
They created fusion.
At least they claim so.
It is clear from the article.
The article says nothing about creating fusion. The announcement was first plasma not fusion.
The solar compatible meter does a couple of things. First, it allows solar generated power to go back to the grid if on-site usage is below generated power levels. Second, it communicates with the utility company so they can manage the entire grid. Third, I *think* it both prevents consumer-generated power from leaking onto the grid during outages, and notifies the utility that there is on-site power generation. The last point is critical for safety - If your house is "hot" during an outage, that power can't be permitted to leak onto the grid otherwise it would be extremely hazardous to workers that are restoring service.
The balcony solar kits are supposed to monitor grid power and they're supposed to shut off the power if grid power goes out. That's a lot of *should*. A certified solar compatible meter and panel solves that part of the problem, but it's stupidly expensive due to the regulatory requirements for permits and electricians to do the work. A homeowner can't simply ask the utility company to put in a solar meter. There's more to it and it makes the costs skyrocket.
The issue with the meters is some don't have the ability to measure direction of flow. If you install a balcony solar system and it produces more energy than you are using at the time the energy you are putting back into the grid is counted as energy consumed and you end up being billed for it.
A workaround is some balcony kits have CTs you place around the main conductors feeding your panel. The solar inverter will use the CT to ensure no excess energy is exported.
All micro inverter kits have working anti-islanding as a standard feature. Normal PV systems work the same way. This isn't a function of the meter and isn't optional. The grid communicates with grid tied inverters directly by monitoring AC frequency. In certain areas like CA and HI there are specific frequency thresholds used to kick the grid tied inverters offline.
I can buy alcohol because I don't live in Saudi Arabia. I can have an OS that doesn't know or care how old I am because I don't live in California. That law literally doesn't apply to me. If I make a distro where I am, why should I bother with age verification at all? It's none of my business if a friend of a friend or a complete stranger decides to download it and install it on a machine in California. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
You can get fired at the drop of a hat for no reason at all. Bosses blow their top over being 1 minute late. Fill out these forms you just filled out last week and again online before you can see the doctor. IRS knows exactly what you made and what you paid in witholding, and what you owe but YOU need to compute it, better not be wrong! Don't be late! Rent and mortgage take up an ever increasing portion of your monthly income (if any). 23 calls a day, mostly scams. You have health insurance even though it was damned expensive, but somehow you still owe a heap of money you don't have after a single visit to the ER.
Meanwhile, you're getting badgered about your "credit score". If you let it get bad everything gets more expensive and it gets harder to get a job (for some reason).
Yeah, you're less likely to actually die today than years ago, but your place in life is far more precarious than it was even 20 years ago. More things demand your attention.
That was always one of the suspension of disbelief breaking aspects of Star Trek, too. As if anyone would deal with all the responsibilities and risks involved in being a starship crew member when you could just fake the entire experience in a holosuite instead.
Which is more believable? Simulating real life in a holodeck or the Goddess of Empathy?
"Now this is a totally brain damaged algorithm. Gag me with a smurfette." -- P. Buhr, Computer Science 354
